The Ringer-Verse
Pricing Puzzles, 'Star Fox,' and the N64 30th-Anniversary Draft | Button Mash
24 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Hello and welcome into The Ringerverse, your Nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, senior editor at The Ringer, button mash host, and card-carrying N64 kid at heart for life. We have a supersized episode in store for you today. Fortunately, this podcast supports a special expansion pack for increased memory capacity. So just slap that sucker in and you should be good to go.
We are lucky that LLMs hadn't happened yet in the Nintendo 64 era, or we would have had to pay through the nose for those four extra megabytes. But back then, we had instant messenger chatbots that didn't plagiarize Destroy the Environment or raise RAM prices, shout out to Smarter Child. We have so much to discuss today. GTA pre-orders, Steam machine pricing, Xbox drama, what else is new?
Brief reviews of Star Fox for Switch 2 and The Adventures of Elliot. Thoughts and hopes for Nintendo's Ocarina remake. But the biggest news of all is that this week, the Nintendo 64 turned 30. The latest clue in a growing body of evidence that we must be considerably older than 30, which doesn't seem possible, but dismayingly does appear to check out.
So to mark the occasion, to wish N64 a happy 30th, we'll be conducting a draft of N64 games. And as a tribute to the system that popularized the practice of shipping with four built-in controller ports... we have a four-player podcast. No odd job allowed. With us, not as always, but as often, is a man who is on top of the world.
Not only did his Knicks win a championship, but he himself is a champion because this week, at long last, he beat Crimson Desert. Congrats on both counts, Mr. Matt James. Life-changing events, Ben. I'll never be the same. How would you order those in terms of their importance to you and your happiness?
Yeah, I'm going to have to put the Knicks championship above Crimson Desert, I think. Okay. It was about 196 hours in Crimson Desert. And let me just do the quick hour conversion to 32 years of my life. Yeah, I'm not good at math. It's the Knicks, though. The Knicks. Yeah, definitely Knicks.
Yeah. Yeah, they managed to patch the Knicks finally, much as Crimson Desert has been patched repeatedly. I imagine that this game played pretty differently by the time you finished it than it did when you started it. It's sort of a ship of PCS situation.
It's just an entirely new game. You have to start all over now. I legitimately recommend it to people now. Not just weirdos like me.
Hey, we recommended it pre-release. Not Steve, but we did. Anyway, it's on version 12 now, I think. Not counting hot fixes. So really, start all over again and experience it anew. He may not be a Knicks fan, but he is still riding high from that glimpse he got of Kingdom Hearts 4 at this month's Nintendo Direct two weeks ago.
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Chapter 2: What are the expectations for the 'Star Fox' remake?
Right.
that the market craves something like this, that I'm in that target market as someone who appreciates the convenience of console gaming, but is regularly PC curious and would be happy to just have a pre-built solution for anyone who's intimidated by the idea of building their own thing and sourcing their own components, just to have something off the rack that worked well and was convenient and no muss, no fuss.
It's a good proposition. It's a bad price point, and it's just going to limit the reach, unfortunately, at least for now and for the foreseeable future. So I'm sure it'll be a worthy product in some respects, but the potential for it to be a breakout one and one that could kind of reshape gaming... I think that's kind of out the window now, and it's unfortunate.
And, you know, this is happening at the same time as what seems to be to be sort of an inflection point in just the public embrace of AI. You know, film bros are reeling right now. Everyone's been betrayed by the A24 AI deal with Google DeepMind, but it's happening in gaming everywhere, too.
Chapter 3: What are the predictions for the GTA VI price?
And Epic has been promoting Unreal Engine 6 and its integration with Cloud and Gemini and other AI tools. And even the current generation 5.8 Unreal Engine will have a plugin that will allow developers to just connect these models directly to the engine. There's a longtime Epic veteran named Short DeYoung who... has served as an evangelist for Unreal Engine. That's been his job.
And he just resigned because he said, this era has come to a close. We're reaching a pivotal point. And as much as I love the old way of working, I think it would be strategic to come to terms with where this is heading. Even though he didn't specify that he was talking about AI, it was widely interpreted as being about that. So this is not changing.
If anything, the resistance is being reduced and we're nowhere near the end of this shortage. So I just, I don't see an end to the current crisis of hardware prices rising. And Matt, maybe you were right to have built yourself a PC that was pretty expensive months ago, but not as expensive as it would be today.
Yeah, I actually just priced out what my PC would cost today that I bought, I think, in January or February. And it's up $500, basically. Oh, my God. Congrats to you. Your investment.
My Steam Deck is worth like a grand and a half now with my memory.
Make sure you pop your PS5 lid off and suck the dust out of there.
Yeah, make sure there's no roaches in that thing.
If that thing eats and breaks, you're going to need a new mortgage. So... I was joking about my N64 expansion pack, but here it is. I'm holding it to the camera. This thing now, those four megabytes, it's appreciating this.
You got to strip that thing like a railroad nail.
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Chapter 4: What are the nostalgic memories associated with Super Smash Bros.?
Well...
No, OK, you melee purists, don't give me that. I mean, look, in terms of pure competitive tournament play, OK, but just the feel of original Smash for me, the kind of floatiness of it just can't be beaten. And maybe that is just because we're all products of our times. But something about the way that game played and plays has just never been equaled for me.
Another tenement to my childhood is this was the game when I was just outright lied to about the things that I could do, where it's like, oh my God, if you beat this certain level at a certain time with a certain character, you can play as the master hand. And I was like doing that for like weeks and weeks and trying to figure out like, no, you never could. Never.
No, you could play as Glover in Glover. The N64 platformer who kind of looks like draft picks. Sorry, that's that's Rob's next pick. I know. But but no. And it was also incredible at the time to have this mashup of N64 characters. Absolutely.
Chapter 5: How does the group assess the legacy of the Nintendo 64?
Yeah. an extremely non-Nintendo thing to do, and obviously ruffled some feathers at Nintendo HQ, because it was like, this is not our brand. We can't have our mascot characters beating up on each other. You know, there's no blood or anything, but nonetheless, to have all these characters from different franchises coming together in one game... Wow.
So, look, I think we took the obligatory top three, and yet the amount of time we've spent talking about Super Smash Bros., you've done well with this pick. I appreciate it.
And I have to say, for that reason, the surprise factor of this game even existing in the first place, I mean, just hit me like a fucking meteor. And I first encountered it, hadn't read about it in, I guess like a Nintendo Power would be still going at that point in time. I went to a Blockbuster video.
And for some reason, my local Blockbuster had a Japanese copy of Super Smash Brothers on the shelf. Holy shit. Free US release. And I was like, what on earth is this? That's the coolest thing ever.
Chapter 6: What are the highlights of the N64 game draft?
The simpler times before we knew release dates and we knew delays.
Ignorance was bliss.
I mean, it was sweet and pure for sure. But I'm happy to have Super Smash Brothers. Now I am faced with sort of a philosophical dilemma. I would say there are two other great games on the board that are suspiciously close to two games that have already been selected. Right?
Yeah.
Are those worthy selections for the second round? I would say in one category, maybe so. And so I will be selecting The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask. Good for you, buddy. I don't have as profound a relationship to as Ocarina of Time, but I'm simply going to do it because it's basically Ocarina of Time.
Listen, buddy, I'm playing to win, and I literally think that Majora's Mask is better than Ocarina of Time.
Why didn't you take Majora's Mask?
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Chapter 7: What games are mentioned as underrated or overlooked?
Because you can't win this path with Majora's Mask. Well, thank you for the praise of my pick. It sounds like I made two great picks that Steve wishes he could have made.
Is that action adventure for you? I will take it in action adventure. Yeah, look, I mean, sometimes being blocked with those first picks, it forces you to get clever, to get creative, to dig deep and come up with well-remembered picks. Now, you've put me in a difficult position here because, as you alluded to, there's another game on the board.
If you had not taken Majora, I would have taken Majora. But now I can't. And so I face the dilemma of do I want to double up on rare first-person shooters? Can I corner the market? That would be vicious, I got to say. I mean, yeah, it would just to block you guys because there are a lot of great shooters on Nintendo 64, but I do feel like there's a top two.
And if I collect both of those top two, I have sort of sealed that category for myself. I mean, and I have plenty of other categories where this can go. So, you know what? At the risk of handicapping myself in other categories, I'm just, I'm going to double up. I'm taking Perfect Dark. This is incredible. I'm taking Perfect Dark and I'm going to put it in multiplayer party game. And
Perfect Arc was so ahead of its time that it was almost unplayable on Nintendo 64, which is not a great argument in its favor, I will admit. But this game was so demanding that you could play like maybe a third of it without the expansion pack. And obviously there were some games that required it. the expansion pack.
But this one, in order to be able to access all of it and to have anything like a playable frame rate that was not just sort of, you know, strobe light kind of gameplay, you had to have it. But this game, you know, obviously there are a lot of games that are compared to these two and there are other shooters and you guys may have to draft some.
But this felt so futuristic, both in its setting and the fact that it was an original. It was not some licensed game, you know, and we had aliens and we had so many multiplayer options. Just like, you know, you want a sneak preview of the online era of multiplayer shooters and just the way that you can customize the matches and everything. Perfect Dark was that.
And unlike some of these other greats, it has not really been remade and followed up on that much. I mean, a little bit, obviously. They tried, yeah. They tried, and there was a perfect dark effort that was scuttled in recent years. And maybe you just can't recapture the greatness that was that game.
And look, there will probably be some haters here who say that I've cornered this category and I've cost myself in other areas. And I'm here to say that I have options in those categories too. And so I am ruthlessly selecting what I would believe to be the consensus top two. And also, you know, the top two shooters of my heart as well for this system. I got to do it.
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